Islamist Group IFE Infiltrating Labour Party

[rumbelow]

Channel 4 Dispatches
Britains Islamic Republic
Dispatches investigates a fundamentalist Islamic group headquartered in Britain, and its claims to have placed its 'brothers' in positions of political power here.

Using undercover recordings, investigative journalist Andrew Gilligan reveals the group's ambitions to create a worldwide 'Islamic social and political order,' and the concerns of a mainstream party that they are being 'infiltrated'; and talks to the Muslims who want to stop it.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/disp ... od#3037414

[kiki5711]

Man they are freagn getting on my nerves. Every time I see a muslim I feel like shouting BOOOOOO!

[rumbelow]

You have a problem with islamists even in Atlanta kiki?

Douglas Murray of The Telegraph has this to say...

If anyone missed Channel 4’s Dispatches the other night, can I very much recommend it? “Britain’s Islamic Republic” is available here
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/disp ... od#3037414
and is vital viewing.
Andrew Gilligan’s programme will be shocking even for those of you who, like me, thought they couldn’t be shocked by this sort of thing any more.

Very excellent investigative report, focussing mainly on a so far very successful attempt to form an Islamist controlled bloc in Tower Hamlets in East London and other UK boroughs ... the IFE having branches in various other UK locations as well as internationally in 14 other countries.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

... focussing mainly on a so far very successful attempt to form an Islamist controlled bloc in Tower Hamlets in East London and other UK boroughs...

Private Eye have been running exposés on this Tower Hamlets lot, and won some ludicrous "Islamophobia award" for doing so - like whatever

[rumbelow]

The Guardian, Comment is Free article... Andrew Gilligan

IFE: not harmless democrats

Members of Islamic Forum Europe, despite what their defenders say, are concealing their real views in order to win power

Andrew Gilligan
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 March 2010 12.38 GMT


When we at Channel 4 set out to make our Dispatches programme on the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe, we could almost have written the complaints in advance. And that, it turns out, is precisely what our new friends in the IFE did.

As early as 22 February, according to emails kindly leaked to us by our IFE snouts, they were circulating sizzling, oven-ready template letters ("I write to express my disgust and disappointment at Channel 4's wholly inaccurate and defamatory accusations ... The documentary is Islamophobic in nature ... uses emotive and provocative language ... is part of a series of organised, vindictive and orchestrated witch-hunts") about a programme still nearly a week from air.

Fascinatingly, the IFE's response since the actual broadcast has been much more muted. Perhaps the unequivocal statement by the local Labour MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, that they have infiltrated his party; or the squirming refusal of the local Labour council leader, Lutfur Rahman, to deny it; or the 110% growth in Labour members in the area in two years, many of them with the same names as people we can link to the IFE – perhaps these have silenced a few of those concerns about "inaccuracy."

Perhaps our unemotive, factual quotation from original IFE documents has helped still those complaints about "defamation" and "vindictiveness". Such as, for instance, the transcript of a 2009 recruit training course where the organisation tells its new members: "Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da'wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da'wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad [struggle]. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order]."

Or the leaflet where the IFE tells us that it is dedicated to changing the "very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed ... from ignorance to Islam." Or the document where the IFE says it "strives for the establishment of a global [my italics] society, the Khilafah ... comprised of individuals who live by the principles of ... the Shari'ah." The IFE's "primary work" to create this state, the document goes on, "is in Europe [my italics] because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum."

Life in the IFE's Islamic social and political order would be different from the way it is now. "Protect yourselves from all types of haram [forbidden things] ... music, TV, and freemixing with women in that which is not necessary" the IFE recruits are told. "Democracy, if it means at the expense of not implementing the sharia, of course no one agrees with that," says the IFE's community affairs coordinator, Azad Ali.

Inayat Bunglawala's attempt, therefore, to claim in this space yesterday that the IFE are merely regular Muslims seeking "democratic engagement" is hopeless. The IFE's enmity to democracy comes from their own lips.

I have no objection at all to the IFE engaging in the political process in support of their views – so long as they are honest about them. But I very much object to what they are actually doing: concealing those views to win significant and growing power over their community through democratic, secular parties whose values are diametrically opposed to theirs.

The IFE's deceit is borne of necessity. For all their claims that any attack on them is an attack on Islam itself, they know that their support among Muslims is small – as shown in our documentary, where Muslim Londoner after Muslim Londoner lined up to express their outrage at the IFE's presumptuousness as much as at its views. The fact that fully 70% of our interviewees were Muslim should answer any charge that this was an "Islamophobic" programme.

My Muslim friends and I believe in a world that is, in Louis MacNeice's fine words, "incorrigibly plural". We see no reason why we should have to be defined by our faith, unless we want to be. Like the poet, we feel the drunkenness of things being various. The cold Islamic supremacists of the IFE are the enemies not just of democracy, but of multiculturalism and pluralism itself. Their indulgence by the political system is one of the hidden scandals of our time.

[rumbelow]

I'm thinking this topic either doesn't interest anyone too much here or it's just a very slow forum anyway here is a bit more to read about for anyone who may not be able to access the play it again service.

Islamic radicals 'infiltrate' the Labour Party
A Labour minister says his party has been infiltrated by a fundamentalist Muslim group that wants to create an “Islamic social and political order” in Britain.

Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister
By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 10:00PM GMT 27 Feb 2010
The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) — which believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state — has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve “mass mobilisation” of voters.

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties.
“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.

“They are completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.”

Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and “corrupted” his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s. Leaked Labour lists show a 110 per cent rise in party membership in one constituency in two years.

In a six-month investigation by this newspaper and Channel 4’s Dispatches, involving weeks of covert filming by the programme’s reporters:

* IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already “consolidated … a lot of influence and power” over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a £1 billion budget.
* We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than £10 million of taxpayers’ money, much of it from government funds designed to “prevent violent extremism”.
* IFE leaders were recorded expressing opposition to democracy, support for sharia law or mocking black people. The IFE organised meetings with extremists, including Taliban allies, a man named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a man under investigation by the FBI for his links to the September 11 attacks.
* Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, curbing behaviour they deemed “un-Islamic”. The owner of a dating agency received a threatening email from an IFE activist, warning her to close it.
* George Galloway, a London MP, admitted in recordings obtained by this newspaper that his surprise victory in the 2005 election owed more to the IFE “than it would be wise – for them – for me to say, adding that they played a “decisive role” in his triumph at the polls.

Mr Galloway now says they were one of many groups which supported his anti-war stance and had never sought to influence him.

The IFE has particularly close links to Tower Hamlets council. Seven serving and former councillors said Lutfur Rahman, the current council leader, gained his post with the group’s help.

Some said they were canvassed by a senior IFE official on his behalf. After Mr Rahman was elected, a man with close links to the group, Lutfur Ali, was appointed assistant chief executive of the council with responsibility for grant funding.

This was despite a chequered employment record, a misleading CV and a negative report from the headhunters appointed to consider the candidates. The council’s white chief executive was subsequently forced from his post.

Since Mr Rahman became leader, more council grants have been paid to a number of organisations which our investigation established are closely linked to the IFE.

Funding for other, secular groups was ended or cut. In the borough’s well-known Brick Lane area, council funds were switched from a largely secular heritage trail to a highly controversial “hijab sculpture”, angering many residents who accused the council of “religious triumphalism”.

Schools in Tower Hamlets are told by the council should close for the Muslim festival of Eid, even where most of their pupils are not Muslim.

Mr Rahman refused to deny that an IFE activist had canvassed councillors on his behalf. He said: “There are various people across Tower Hamlets who get excited, who get involved.”

He would not comment on concerns about infiltration, saying they were “party matters”. He said: “If you look at our flagship policies, like investing £20 million to tackle overcrowding, you can see that we are working for everyone.”

The IFE said it did not seek to influence the council and had not lobbied for Mr Rahman. “If anything, existing members of the Labour Party have joined the IFE, rather than the other way round,” it said.

The group insisted it was not a fundamentalist or extremist organisation and did not support violence.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... Party.html

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MUSLIM LEADER’S DEATH THREAT CALLS OVER DRESS

By Ted Jeory

Shiria Khatun

A SECULAR Muslim woman councillor has been forced to dress more conservatively after receiving death threats and sexually harassing phone calls from members of her own community.

Shiria Khatun, 38, has called in the police over the sinister calls in which threats were made not only against her, but also her four young children.

In one they warned they would dig up parents’ graves and bury her there instead.

The Labour councillor in the controversial borough of Tower Hamlets—named in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last week as a centre of Islamic fundamentalism—is considered one of the area’s most progressive politicians.

She was elected in 2006, worked for Ken Livingstone as a transport adviser at London’s City Hall and frequently campaigns for more Muslim women to enter politics.

However, over the past year she has been the victim of a “sick” harassment campaign.

She has been bombarded with anonymous calls and even followed home.

At first she was “too embarrassed” to call the police, but when the threats, mostly made in the Bangladeshi dialect Sylheti, targeted her family she decided to act.

She said: “As a councillor I’m meant to be a strong woman and I didn’t want to show that I was bothered, but it’s gone too far.

“They’re really disgusting. They would talk about my Western clothes, my tight jeans and my body parts.

“One man said—and it sounds much nastier in Sylheti—‘I know where you live and I’m going to come and show you and your kids’. I just hung up.

“I really thought it was a pervert, but then it started to get more intense. My parents died when I was young and the callers must know that because they said they would dig up their graves and bury me inside. I think they’re sick.”

Following the calls, she started wearing more loose-fitting traditional Asian clothes and glasses instead of contact lenses to be “taken more seriously”.

She said: “I didn’t even realise that I was giving into them, but my skirts started getting longer and the whole thing left me demoralised.

“Other Muslim women have advised me to dress down because of rumours within the Bengali community, mostly men, criticising me for being too Western looking.

“I don’t like people exploiting religion to tell me I’m not a proper Muslim. We live in a democratic society and I have the right to dress how I like.”

She has so far refused to wear the Muslim hijab headscarf, something she said is a more common sight on the streets of Tower Hamlets—a densely Bangladeshi-populated borough—than in Bangladesh itself.

Many put that down to the growing influence of the strict Saudi Arabian Wahhabi doctrine of Islam in the East End of London.

Cllr Khatun added: “I returned from a visit to Bangladesh not long ago and it’s definitely more conservative here than it is there.

“I used to look at the photos of Bangladeshi women who came here in the Sixties and go ‘Wow!’ and think how amazingly fashionable and liberal they were with their short-sleeved blouses and bouffant hairdos.

“It’s all changed so much now for younger women.”

Police confirmed they were investigating the councillor’s complaint.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162 ... over-dress

[Xeno]

It is not that it is slow. It is just that we start with a fairly natural presumption that you are banging on about crap based on opinion pieces by conservative columnists.

cheers

[rumbelow]

It is not that it is slow. It is just that we start with a fairly natural presumption that you are banging on about crap based on opinion pieces by conservative columnists.

cheers

Why, thank you so much for explaining that to me.
Congratulations!...after just 53 posts it seems you are now the self-appointed spokesperson for all Rationalia forum members Xeno, well done!

[rumbelow]

So what is all the funding that is being syphoned off into the East London Mosque by IFE cronies in Tower Hamlets Council actually producing there, how about this East London Mosque hosted presentation by the chubby homophobic lunatic Abdul Karim Hattin wearing his frilly fat-lady dress, can't imagine anyone wanting to go anywhere near his fat, hairy, sweaty crack myself...perhaps that's the real cause of all his beefy beefing (apparently he takes this flabby homophobic show all round the country):
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2010/03/05/ ... ou-to-see/

[Arse]

It is not that it is slow. It is just that we start with a fairly natural presumption that you are banging on about crap based on opinion pieces by conservative columnists.

cheers

Do "we" now? You might, but for those of us who read Private Eye the Islamist corruption in Tower Hamlets is something we've known about for a long time. I'm quite surprised it took the rest of the media this long to pick up on it.

[HomerJay]

I'm thinking this topic either doesn't interest anyone too much here or it's just a very slow forum

I think it just all happened earlier in the week and this thread was a bit johnny comelately.

[rumbelow]

I'm thinking this topic either doesn't interest anyone too much here or it's just a very slow forum

I think it just all happened earlier in the week and this thread was a bit johnny comelately.

You think it's all over then Homerjay? personally I don't think so...certainly some of the articles I posted here the same day they hit the papers so I'd say the situation is ongoing even if you may have lost interest and so consider the story is last weeks arsewipe.
I used to work in the East end until just under a couple of years ago and there was plenty of talk about this back then so I do know it's been local knowledge for some time regarding the IFE takeover of the Tower Hamlets Council, an investigation is way overdue.

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We Are All Working Our Socks Off for an Islamic Superstate
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andre ... uperstate/

[Chinaski]

I watched the Dispatches documentary today. What the fuck.

Coming after a debate I had with proclaimed moderate Muslims from my school, I am now convinced that Europe can not integrate Muslims who do not wish to be integrated. They come, live in walled in, isolated communities, with 4 or 5 generations growing up solely within that culture. They don't want to be integrated, and the Muslim sense of superiority causes a lack of tolerance and an active attempt to undermine the democratic, secular structure that allows them to live decent lives in European countries. Change for Islam must come within, they need their own enlightenment. In the meantime, Europe has to do what it can to preserve its (relative) secularism and democracy. This goes to all religions, although the Islamic issue is more pressing due to geo-political elements as well.

I don't regret my country's decision to ban minarets, and I would vote for a banning of mosques, burqas, and anything else as well. Islam is a virus that needs to be quarantined until it heals itself.